by Helen Harris
‘No, don’t mind me dear; I’ll be all right in a tick. You might imagine it was a relief to have Leonard off my hands. Well, it wasn’t. As soon as he was back in hospital, I knew in my bones it was for good. I would have done anything then to have him back here, even ranting and raving and calling me names like he did. But it wasn’t to be. He sank fast. I went up there religiously at visiting hours every day, come rain, come shine. Some days he knew me and called me by my name and some days he hadn’t a clue, especially towards the end. He slept a lot and, of course, I didn’t like to wake him. And even when he was awake, what with his drugs and everything, he didn’t always make much sense. I lost him long before I lost him, if you get my meaning. Those last weeks, when I used to go up to the hospital and sit beside him, he wasn’t really there any more. However much you’ve seen it coming and dreaded it, you’re never really prepared when it happens. I’d stored up the things I wanted to say to him at the end, things to do with past problems we’d had. But they were troublesome things and I knew they wouldn’t be easy to get out. So I was saving them up for the very end. And without even realizing it, I left it too late. Because although Leonard didn’t actually pass away until the first week of January, he never completely came to his senses again. It was terrible, sitting there beside him with all of it left unsaid. I did try and tell him some of it, but he gave no sign of having heard.
‘The end came on a bitter January night. I’d only been back from the hospital a little while. I’d sat with him all afternoon and he’d given no sign of what was around the corner. He seemed, you know, no better and no worse than he’d been since Christmas. I was just sitting down with a cup of tea when the telephone rang. It was the Ward Sister and she said I should come back as fast as I could. I still remember the phrase she used: “The doctor doesn’t like the look of him.” Well, between you and me, dear, he’d not been much to look at for weeks. So I knew something was up.
‘I hurried on with my coat, grabbed my bag and I rushed out to the bus-stop with my hat on any old how. The Sister met me at the door of the ward. They had moved Leonard out into a little side room, she said. I followed her in there, hardly daring to breathe. I thought he must be dead already. You certainly couldn’t tell, to look at him. But apparently I’d got there in the nick of time. There were two nurses in with him, but the Sister told them to leave the two of us for a bit and she went out after them.
‘I sat down by his bed and I looked my last on him. I longed to take his hand, but I didn’t dare somehow. It seemed not quite right. Plus he looked so awfully solemn. So I just sat there, wishing he’d open his eyes if only for a minute, so I could tell him what I wanted. But he didn’t stir. The minutes went by and he gave no sign of life and I was getting desperate. I couldn’t let him pass away without having my say, not after all those years, not after all I’d been through. At last, I leaned forward and I whispered, “Leonard?” No response. I tried again and I gave him the tiniest tap on the back of his hand, just like that. He seemed to give a quiver and he made a choking sound, as if he were trying to get something out too. He rolled his head a little way back as if he wanted to look up at me. Then he lay quite still with this look on his face, I’ll always remember, straining, trying to hear me. So I bent right close to him and I whispered, “Can you hear me? Leonard dearest, can you hear me?” He didn’t bat an eyelid. Just then the Sister came back in. She hadn’t left us that long, it seemed to me, so I looked round at her a bit annoyed. She only had eyes for Leonard. Of course, they all doted on him, all those nurses. I saw her face fall. “Oh, Mrs Queripel,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t get her meaning straight away. “Couldn’t you give us a little longer?” I started to say to her, when I suddenly understood. I looked down at Leonard. I hadn’t realized it, but he had already died.
‘They buried the best part of my life when they buried Leonard. We might have had our moments. I’m not saying it was a bed of roses all the time. But in his own way he was the very best of men. Oh yes, they broke the mould after they made Leonard Queripel. He was always fine and upstanding, always true. He always did right by me. I never had cause for complaint on those grounds. It was like the curtain coming down on one of our plays, Lilies or Lavender, or The Tender Passion. “Happy Ever After”. He was my leading man and I followed him gladly all the days of my life. Many people would say we had a perfect marriage and, for all I know, they’d be right.’
*
Mr Charles is due to submit his history of the English interior to his publisher before the publisher goes away on his summer holiday. We have been working flat out. In the warmer weather, our twin green offices are both equally close and stuffy. Mr Charles works in his shirt-sleeves, with those old-fashioned metal arm-bands round his arms, having apologized decorously to me for doing so. One afternoon, as we were sorting slides in his room, he exclaimed, ‘Gracious, it’s like the black hole of Calcutta in here,’ and bounding up a pair of library steps which he has for reaching high bookshelves, he prodded open his murky skylight with a long hooked pole. He looked down at me mischievously from the ladder, unaware of his halo of sunlit spiders’ webs, and balanced on one leg, with the pole outstretched, he joked, ‘Which well-known statue of classical antiquity do I remind you of?’
We giggled in a rare moment of glorious silliness. Most of the time, we work fearfully soberly together, as though the English interior were a place of worship where you may only speak in whispers. I sit opposite Mr Charles as he goes through the final selection of pictures and I take notes for the captions. Sometimes we smile together over an odd detail; a fire extinguisher which will have to be erased from an otherwise exquisite eighteenth-century drawing-room; some excruciatingly ugly plastic fruits which disfigure a Rococo dining-table. But most of the time, we are utterly businesslike. Only, one evening last week, when we had stayed particularly late – I love walking out through the dark deserted galleries when the museum is closed – Mr Charles asked me delicately, ‘I do hope these late sessions haven’t been causing you any – ah – inconvenience?’
I think he was surprised by the vehemence of my denial. After all, we often stay until eight or even nine o’clock nowadays and then sometimes go for a drink in the pink pub together afterwards. I am seldom home much before ten.
‘Oh, but it’s so fascinating,’ I enthused. ‘I assure you, it’s far more interesting than anything I’d be doing at home.’
Mr Charles looked concerned. ‘You’re much too young to bury yourself in your work the way I do, you know,’ he reproached me unconvincingly.
My preparations for Eastbourne are going along splendidly: I’ve got the train timetables, the tickets, the cologne tissues in case the emotion proves too much for Mrs Q, the lozenges for travel sickness. Even the long-range weather forecast is brilliant. Rob watches me get ready with one eyebrow permanently raised. He views the jaunt as a ludicrous last straw. It is almost more than I can bear to listen to his satirical version of my planned expedition, as recounted to Andy and Jean and Eddy. But, funnily enough, he is being noticeably tolerant on the subject to me; as if he hoped that, being the last straw, the expedition might also bring my bewitchment to an end and things would change for the better afterwards.
Then, a couple of days ago, he announced that he had to go off to Wales. He hadn’t intended to at first. He thought he’d gathered enough material for his play already. Only then he decided that regionalism was a good idea, he says; all the different accents would add something to the polyphonic effect. So, if I didn’t object, he thought he would go up there at the end of the week and spend a few days talking to people. He had an old university friend he could stay with in Swansea. He waited for a moment when he’d said that, almost as if he hoped that I would object. If I really minded, he even added, he supposed he could wait and go after the weekend.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t really listening to what he said. I don’t think I had for ages. I just answered rather gruffly, what would be the point of that, when
he knew perfectly well I’d be away all of Sunday in any case?
I only really listened to our conversation when he had gone, when, realizing there was something unavoidably odd in the way he had said goodbye to me and his crêpe-soled shoes had gone gravely down the stairs, not running or bounding, I stopped short and replayed the conversation to myself.
‘Oh, well then,’ he said nastily, ‘I’m fully dispensable, aren’t I?’ I went, ‘Ts!’ or something similar.
After a pause, Rob added, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have the home phone number of the friend I’ll be staying with, only the office one, which is a bit of a drag. It means you won’t be able to get in touch with me over the weekend if you need to.’
I said rudely, ‘I’ll survive.’
‘Oh,’ said Rob, ‘I don’t doubt you will. Live it up, my dear! But it’s just conceivable we might have a break-in, right? Or an arsonist might burn the place down. I don’t like leaving you with no way of contacting me.’
‘What’s this guy’s name?’ I asked absentmindedly. ‘Isn’t he in the phone book?’
Rob laughed, a short satisfied laugh. ‘Anderson,’ he said. ‘Sarah Anderson. And no, she isn’t in the phone book.’
But, even then, believe it or not, I didn’t hear what he was trying to warn me of. I just mumbled something to the effect that I was sure I could get hold of him if there was an emergency. It was only on Friday morning, when he had closed the front door behind him and gone uncharacteristically gravely down the stairs, when the flat was filled by that odd silence, that finally I heard.
By then, of course, it was too late. Not that I minded deeply. I felt no inclination to hurtle down the stairs after him, crying, ‘Come back, come back, I’m sorry Rob, don’t do it!’ If anything, I was even faintly pleased. Rob’s cheap little ploy gave me the pretext I had been waiting for, to take my final bold but possibly insane step.
*
Alicia couldn’t honestly say, in her heart of hearts, that she had been expecting Leonard to be waiting to meet her on the platform at Eastbourne. But when he wasn’t, and the station was swarming with young foreigners jabbering away in French and German and God-knows-what, she did feel a little let-down all the same.
They walked out of the station into a beautiful bright morning. Alison had arranged everything perfectly, down to the last detail. She had come to collect Alicia on the dot of ten and they had ridden to Victoria Station in a taxi. Alicia hadn’t been inside a taxi for years. The effort of appearing unimpressed by it took her mind off her nerves. She hadn’t been inside Victoria Station for even longer, of course, and she thought fearfully that if Alison hadn’t been with her, she didn’t know if she would have been able to find her way around. Which was a nonsense, because she used to know that station like the back of her hand. But it had grown twice as big and twice as black and twice as noisy, and she had to pretend to feel a little unsteady for a moment and take hold of Alison’s arm. The train left from the wrong platform. However, Alison was adamant that she had checked and double-checked that it was the right train and there were certainly the right names, Lewes in smaller letters and Eastbourne in big, on the departure board. But all the same, Alicia climbed into the train with a dubious queasiness and sat forward on the edge of her seat to start with, quite prepared for the train to set off into the wrong scenery and for them to have to get down at some unknown wayside station.
The train left at ten forty-seven and, after the blackened expanses of South London, did turn out to be travelling through the right scenery: East Croydon, Lewes and, at last, Polegate. Alicia sat quite quiet and tried to collect her thoughts, which kept skittering off in all sorts of wild directions: windows perhaps left open, electricity perhaps left on, house perhaps savagely burgled in her absence and turned upside-down. Alison had bought the Sunday papers, as well as a choice of magazines, but although Alicia had chided her for the extravagance, she didn’t have it in her to glance at them. She stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the far horizon, and wondered what on earth she had let herself in for.
‘How d’you feel?’ asked Alison, as the green back of the cliffs reared up to the right of the train. ‘Are you excited?’
Alicia realized that they had scarcely spoken a word to each other the whole journey and it dawned on her that maybe Alison was simply in a sulk because she was bored with the whole expedition already. Alicia shot her a searching look. No, her face was every bit as excited as Alicia could have wished and as the train started to slow down, she leaned over and grabbed Alicia’s arm and exclaimed, ‘Gosh, we’re here. We’ve actually made it at last!’
It was just gone noon and clearly their first priority was lunch. They walked out into Terminus Road. That hadn’t changed for the better. As they headed towards the front in the straggling procession from the train, Alicia could hear foreign languages on all sides and the road seemed to be full of unkempt young people in strange get-ups, not very different from Shepherd’s Bush Green. Restaurants had sprung up all along the last stretch, all Italian and Greek, and she had a moment of sheer panic that they wouldn’t be able to find anything edible to eat at all and they should have brought sandwiches. The sun beat down and smelt of foreign frying. She might as well be abroad.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Alison at her elbow. ‘It’s not too far to walk?’
Alicia shook her head wretchedly, her lips jammed tight shut. She stood no chance of meeting any ghosts here.
But they came towards the end of the road and things looked up. There was a sweet-shop on the right which she remembered, its window glistening with rock and rosy sweets, and a fish and chip restaurant full of nice white English people with their heads down over plates of cod and hake and skate. A few steps more and all would be revealed. Ahead of her, she could already see the shining, unchanging sea.
The two of them stood on the corner and, to either side, the Parade spread its curving white wings. It looked as though not one hotel had changed and in a trice Alicia felt the years slip away. She had no corns, no tightness in her chest and no nerves, and the arm in her arm wasn’t Alison’s. They stood entranced and it wasn’t until the surging lunch-time crowds jostled them that Alison seemed to take a hold on herself and say, ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down and admire the view.’
They passed a couple of lunch places and Alicia wondered whatever would she do? She had her heart in her mouth; she couldn’t swallow a morsel, she was sure. But Alison squeezed her hand and said with a gay turn of phrase, which she was not to know would bring a lump to Alicia’s throat, ‘Today’s my treat. I want to take you to a nice hotel.’
Beyond the bay window the floral displays were at their best, massed beds of red and gold which spoke of dignity and pride. Beyond the floral displays, the deck-chairs stood in rows, some empty now at lunchtime but others topped by a reclining head. True, their occupants had aged shockingly. In both directions, there was nothing but silvery hair in the deck-chairs, as far as the eye could see. Beyond the deck-chairs was the beach, a short steep slope of dappled stones divided by the wooden breakwaters into regular slices of sunbathers. A picnic for all the cast on the beach – that had been the thing, with a great hamper laid on by Leonard and chilled bottles of sparkling wine. Right below the hotel dining-room, an Indian family was picnicking on the beach. Time was, their clothes would have raised an eyebrow or two. If she turned her head a fraction, they weren’t there and there was music once again, Johnny Icebreaker’s Teatime Trio, and a brazen foot, which she knew without looking belonged to that bounder, was nudging her under the table, urging her to get up and dance. She missed what Alison was saying to her.
‘I said, have you chosen yet?’ asked Alison, and Alicia realized that although it was a while since the disappointingly foreign waiter had handed her the tasselled menu with a flourish, her companion had not ordered for her and, really, it was no wonder now she was reminded who her companion was. She turned back and the Indian family was vividly there, eating God-knows-w
hat off a scarlet and green tablecloth and laughing at the gulls. Leonard always had the beef and she had the lamb. For a giddy moment, she supposed she could have whatever she wanted now. But she quickly took a hold on herself. She owed it to his memory. She answered firmly, ‘I’ll have the lamb.’
‘But, Mrs Queripel,’ Alison said reproachfully, ‘there isn’t any lamb on the menu.’
Alicia deigned to look down at it. Why no, there wasn’t. It was full of silly things like Scampi and Chicken in the Basket. Drum, drum, drum went Leonard’s long fingers on the table-top: come along, woman, we haven’t got all day you know, drum, drum, drum. What is it’s keeping you from choosing? Something on your mind? What is it you’re after? Some pork maybe? Some nice tasty roast pork?
She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘You order for me, dear.’
She didn’t register what Alison ordered and she was caught off-guard when it came, swimming surprisingly over her left shoulder, a flashing silver platter of plaice.
‘All right?’ asked Alison, and Alicia tried to give her a rewarding smile.
‘Lovely, dear,’ she said faintly. Sauté potatoes and peas. You had to be very careful eating fish because of the bones. Imagine the horror of choking in this nice restaurant, in front of all the people, and putting your companion to shame. Sometimes you imagine there is a bone stuck in your throat when there is nothing there at all.
